XI.-THE INTERIOR OF A HEART.

fter the incident last described, the intercourse
between the clergyman and the physician,
though externally the same, was really
of another character than it had previously
been. The intellect of Roger Chillingworth
had now a sufficiently plain path before it.
It was not, indeed, precisely that which he had laid out for himself
to tread. Calm, gentle, passionless, as he appeared, there
was yet, we fear, a quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but
active now, in this unfortunate old man, which led him to imagine
a more intimate revenge than any mortal had ever wreaked upon
an enemy. To make himself the one trusted friend, to whom
should be confided all the fear, the remorse, the agony, the ineffectual
repentance, the backward rush of sinful thoughts, expelled
in vain! All that guilty sorrow, hidden from the world, whose
great heart would have pitied and forgiven, to be revealed to him,
the Pitiless, to him, the Unforgiving! All that dark treasure
to be lavished on the very man, to whom nothing else could so
adequately pay the debt of vengeance!fterThe clergyman’s shy and sensitive reserve had balked this
scheme. Roger Chillingworth, however, was inclined to be
hardly, if at all, less satisfied with the aspect of affairs, which
Providence—using the avenger and his victim for its own purposes,
and, perchance, pardoning where it seemed most to punish—had
substituted for his black devices. A revelation, he could
almost say, had been granted to him. It mattered little, for his
object, whether celestial, or from what other region. By its aid,
in all the subsequent relations betwixt him and Mr. Dimmesdale,
not merely the external presence, but the very inmost soul, of the
latter, seemed to be brought out before his eyes, so that he
could see and comprehend its every movement. He became,
thenceforth, not a spectator only, but a chief actor, in the poor
minister’s interior world. He could play upon him as he chose.
Would he arouse him with a throb of agony? The victim was
forever on the rack; it needed only to know the spring that controlled
the engine;—and the physician knew it well! Would
he startle him with sudden fear? As at the waving of a magician’s
wand, uprose a grisly phantom,—uprose a thousand phantoms,—in
many shapes, of death, or more awful shame, all
flocking round about the clergyman, and pointing with their
fingers at his breast!All this was accomplished with a subtlety so perfect, that the
minister, though he had constantly a dim perception of some
evil influence watching over him, could never gain a knowledge
of its actual nature. True, he looked doubtfully, fearfully,—even,
at times, with horror and the bitterness of hatred,—at
the deformed figure of the old physician. His gestures, his gait,
his grizzled beard, his slightest and most indifferent acts, the
very fashion of his garments, were odious in the clergyman’s
sight; a token implicitly to be relied on, of a deeper antipathy
in the breast of the latter than he was willing to acknowledge
to himself. For, as it was impossible to assign a reason for
such distrust and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale, conscious that
the poison of one morbid spot was infecting his heart’s entire
substance, attributed all his presentiments to no other cause.
He took himself to task for his bad sympathies in reference to
Roger Chillingworth, disregarded the lesson that he should have
drawn from them, and did his best to root them out. Unable
to accomplish this, he nevertheless, as a matter of principle,
continued his habits of social familiarity with the old man, and
thus gave him constant opportunities for perfecting the purpose
to which—poor, forlorn creature that he was, and more wretched
than his victim—the avenger had devoted himself.While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and
tortured by some black trouble of the soul, and given over
to the machinations of his deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale had achieved a brilliant popularity in his sacred
office. He won it, indeed, in great part, by his sorrows. His
intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of experiencing
and communicating emotion, were kept in a state of
preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily
life. His fame, though still on its upward slope, already overshadowed
the soberer reputations of his fellow-clergymen, eminent
as several of them were. There were scholars among them, who
had spent more years in acquiring abstruse lore, connected with
the divine profession, than Mr. Dimmesdale had lived; and who
might well, therefore, be more profoundly versed in such solid
and valuable attainments than their youthful brother. There
were men, too, of a sturdier texture of mind than his, and
endowed with a far greater share of shrewd, hard, iron, or granite
understanding; which, duly mingled with a fair proportion
of doctrinal ingredient, constitutes a highly respectable, efficacious,
and unamiable variety of the clerical species. There were
others, again, true saintly fathers, whose faculties had been elaborated
by weary toil among their books, and by patient thought,
and etherealized, moreover, by spiritual communications with the
better world, into which their purity of life had almost introduced
these holy personages, with their garments of mortality
still clinging to them. All that they lacked was the gift that
descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues
of flame; symbolizing, it would seem, not the power of speech
in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the
whole human brotherhood in the heart’s native language. These
fathers, otherwise so apostolic, lacked Heaven’s last and rarest
attestation of their office, the Tongue of Flame. They would
have vainly sought—had they ever dreamed of seeking—to
express the highest truths through the humblest medium of
familiar words and images. Their voices came down, afar and
indistinctly, from the upper heights where they habitually dwelt.

Not improbably, it was to this latter class of men that Mr.
Dimmesdale, by many of his traits of character, naturally belonged.
To the high mountain-peaks of faith and sanctity he would have
climbed, had not the tendency been thwarted by the burden,
whatever it might be, of crime or anguish, beneath which it was
his doom to totter. It kept him down, on a level with the lowest;
him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice the angels
might else have listened to and answered! But this very burden
it was, that gave him sympathies so intimate with the sinful
brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison
with theirs, and received their pain into itself, and sent its own
throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes of
sad, persuasive eloquence. Oftenest persuasive, but sometimes
terrible! The people knew not the power that moved them
thus. They deemed the young clergyman a miracle of holiness.
They fancied him the mouthpiece of Heaven’s messages of wisdom,
and rebuke, and love. In their eyes, the very ground on
which he trod was sanctified.
The virgins of
his church grew pale
around him, victims of
a passion so imbued with
religious sentiment that
they imagined it to be
all religion,
and brought
it openly, in
their white
bosoms, as
their most
acceptable
sacrifice before
the altar.
The aged
members of
his flock, beholding
Mr. Dimmesdale’s frame so feeble, while they were themselves
so rugged in their infirmity, believed that he would go
heavenward before them, and enjoined it upon their children,
that their old bones should be buried close to their young pastor’s
holy grave. And, all this time, perchance, when poor Mr.
Dimmesdale was thinking of his grave, he questioned with himself
whether the grass would ever grow on it, because an accursed
thing must there be buried!
Not improbably, it was to this latter class of men that Mr.
Dimmesdale, by many of his traits of character, naturally belonged.
To the high mountain-peaks of faith and sanctity he would have
climbed, had not the tendency been thwarted by the burden,
whatever it might be, of crime or anguish, beneath which it was
his doom to totter. It kept him down, on a level with the lowest;
him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice the angels
might else have listened to and answered! But this very burden
it was, that gave him sympathies so intimate with the sinful
brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison
with theirs, and received their pain into itself, and sent its own
throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes of
sad, persuasive eloquence. Oftenest persuasive, but sometimes
terrible! The people knew not the power that moved them
thus. They deemed the young clergyman a miracle of holiness.
They fancied him the mouthpiece of Heaven’s messages of wisdom,
and rebuke, and love. In their eyes, the very ground on
which he trod was sanctified.
The virgins of
his church grew pale
around him, victims of
a passion so imbued with
religious sentiment that
they imagined it to be
all religion,
and brought
it openly, in
their white
bosoms, as
their most
acceptable
sacrifice before
the altar.
The aged
members of
his flock, beholding
Mr. Dimmesdale’s frame so feeble, while they were themselves
so rugged in their infirmity, believed that he would go
heavenward before them, and enjoined it upon their children,
that their old bones should be buried close to their young pastor’s
holy grave. And, all this time, perchance, when poor Mr.
Dimmesdale was thinking of his grave, he questioned with himself
whether the grass would ever grow on it, because an accursed
thing must there be buried!It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration
tortured him! It was his genuine impulse to adore the
truth, and to reckon all things shadow-like, and utterly devoid
of weight or value, that had not its divine essence as the life
within their life. Then, what was he?—a substance?—or the
dimmest of all shadows? He longed to speak out, from his
own pulpit, at the full height of his voice, and tell the people
what he was. “I, whom you behold in these black garments
of the priesthood,—I, who ascend the sacred desk, and turn
my pale face heavenward, taking upon myself to hold communion,
in your behalf, with the Most High Omniscience,—I, in
whose daily life you discern the sanctity of Enoch,—I, whose
footsteps, as you suppose, leave a gleam along my earthly track,
whereby the pilgrims that shall come after me may be guided
to the regions of the blest,—I, who have laid the hand of
baptism upon your children,—I, who have breathed the parting
prayer over your dying friends, to whom the Amen sounded
faintly from a world which they had quitted,—I, your pastor,
whom you so reverence and trust, am utterly a pollution and
a lie!”More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit,
with a purpose never to come down its steps, until he should
have spoken words like the above. More than once, he had
cleared his throat, and drawn in the long, deep, and tremulous
breath, which, when sent forth again, would come burdened
with the black secret of his soul. More than once—nay, more
than a hundred times—he had actually spoken! Spoken!
But how? He had told his hearers that he was altogether vile,
a viler companion of the vilest, the worst of sinners, an abomination,
a thing of unimaginable iniquity; and that the only
wonder was, that they did not see his wretched body shrivelled
up before their eyes, by the burning wrath of the Almighty!
Could there be plainer speech than this? Would not the people
start up in their seats, by a simultaneous impulse, and tear him
down out of the pulpit which he defiled? Not so, indeed!
They heard it all, and did but reverence him the more. They
little guessed what deadly purport lurked in those self-condemning
words. “The godly youth!” said they among themselves.
“The saint on earth! Alas, if he discern such sinfulness in his
own white soul, what horrid spectacle would he behold in thine
or mine!” The minister well knew—subtle, but remorseful
hypocrite that he was!—the light in which his vague confession
would be viewed. He had striven to put a cheat upon
himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had
gained only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame, without
the momentary relief of being self-deceived. He had spoken
the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood.
And yet, by the constitution of his nature, he loved the truth,
and loathed the lie, as few men ever did. Therefore, above all
things else, he loathed his miserable self!His inward trouble drove him to practices more in accordance
with the old, corrupted faith of Rome, than with the better
light of the church in which he had been born and bred. In
Mr. Dimmesdale’s secret closet, under lock and key, there was
a bloody scourge. Oftentimes, this Protestant and Puritan divine
had plied it on his own shoulders; laughing bitterly at himself
the while, and smiting so much the more pitilessly because of
that bitter laugh. It was his custom, too, as it has been that
of many other pious Puritans, to fast,—not, however, like
them, in order to purify the body and render it the fitter
medium of celestial illumination, but rigorously, and until his
knees trembled beneath him, as an act of penance. He kept
vigils, likewise, night after night, sometimes in utter darkness;
sometimes with a glimmering lamp; and sometimes, viewing
his own face in a looking-glass, by the most powerful light
which he could throw upon it. He thus typified the constant
introspection wherewith he tortured, but could not purify, himself.
In these lengthened vigils, his brain often reeled, and
visions seemed to flit before him; perhaps seen doubtfully,
and by a faint light of their own, in the remote dimness of
the chamber, or more vividly, and close beside him, within
the looking-glass. Now it was a herd of diabolic shapes, that
grinned and mocked at the pale minister, and beckoned him
away with them; now a group of shining angels, who flew
upward heavily, as sorrow-laden, but grew more ethereal as they
rose. Now came the dead friends of his youth, and his white-bearded
father, with a saint-like frown, and his mother, turning
her face away as she passed by. Ghost of a mother,—thinnest
fantasy of a mother,—methinks she might yet have thrown a
pitying glance towards her son! And now, through the chamber
which these spectral thoughts had made so ghastly, glided Hester
Prynne, leading along little Pearl, in her scarlet garb, and
pointing her forefinger, first at the scarlet letter on her bosom,
and then at the clergyman’s own breast.None of these visions ever quite deluded him. At any moment,
by an effort of his will, he could discern substances through their
misty lack of substance, and convince himself that they were not
solid in their nature, like yonder table of carved oak, or that big,
square, leathern-bound and brazen-clasped volume of divinity.
But, for all that, they were, in one sense, the truest and most
substantial things which the poor minister now dealt with. It
is the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his, that it steals
the pith and substance out of whatever realities there are around
us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the spirit’s joy and
nutriment. To the untrue man, the whole universe is false,—it
is impalpable,—it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he
himself, in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes
a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist. The only truth that continued
to give Mr. Dimmesdale a real existence on this earth,
was the anguish in his inmost soul, and the undissembled expression
of it in his aspect. Had he once found power to smile,
and wear a face of gayety, there would have been no such
man!On one of those ugly nights, which we have faintly hinted at,
but forborne to picture forth, the minister started from his chair.
A new thought had struck him. There might be a moment’s
peace in it. Attiring himself with as much care as if it had
been for public worship, and precisely in the same manner, he
stole softly down the staircase, undid the door, and issued forth.